Hey there!
I guess someone was going to ask this eventually and that someone might as well be me! So here I am, taking the bullet so you don't have to!

Surveil is a new mechanic from Guilds of Ravnica that is described by everyone, including official sources, as Scry to the graveyard. “Surveil 1” means “Look at the top card of your library, you may put that card into your graveyard”.

As you probably already know, we have a shortcut (MTR 4.2) that states that forgotten scry actions don't get recovered, as the player is assumed to have not looked and chosen to leave the cards in the same order. I am aware that there will most likely be an official statement as soon as the new documents are released, but that usually happens after the prerelease, so I've figured that it could be fair to ask what do you, fellow judges, suggest to do until then, especially because the MTR applies at Regular REL.

On this issue, you can go either with the letter of the rule (it says Scry and nothing else after all) or with the spirit (the mechanic is basically Scry and the philosophy is the same). Right now I feel it's reasonable to go with the latter, but I would like to hear your opinions as well!

Greetings and thanks,
Marco

In the absence of anything that changes officially, my approach to this will be to announce at the start of the event that I encourage everyone to make sure they and their opponents Surveil properly. It’s a Prerelease so we’re here to have fun - not to play “gotcha”.

Then I’m going to treat it like any other time someone at Regular REL doesn’t resolve a spell correctly - find a suitable fix (which is likely just to Surveil now).

I suspect we'll see an answer to this as Guilds gets closer to release. In the meantime, I'm locking this thread to reduce confusion.